Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Dear Comic Art Fan,

Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! If you're looking to spend all that cash your grandparents sent you Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator and Heavy Metal publisher Kevin Eastman currently has his entire studio set up on display at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. He is auctioning off the entire thing on ebay (click here to bid) with 20% of the proceeds to benefit the Hero Initiative! The studio contains his drawing table, plenty of toys and models, and lots of original art by the likes of Simon Bisley and Richard Corben, plus much, much more! Eastman gives a guided tour of what’s included in this video. The auction ends on January 4, 2012 at 9pm PST and Eastman appears for a party at Meltdown! Bid high!

I am Rene Dorenbos, 45 years old, working as a IT manager, and live in The Netherlands with my wife and two sons. I have a daughter as well from my first marriage. We have nine cats, a Chihuahua, and a bearded dragon (a kind of lizard).

I love the thrill of receiving new art in the mail, so I trade a lot. I also sell often art to be able to buy new things. I only have about five or six pieces that I would never sell, particularly because they were made especially for me. That is also why I don't put those on CAF but I will probably change that the coming months.

2. Which piece in your gallery is your favorite?

I am very proud of my Wallace Wood painting. It is probably the last one Wood did, for his magazine Witzend, where the story Lunar Tunes was published. I have two more pieces of cover art for Lunar Tunes, but I didn't put them on CAF yet. I got the cover together with all the pages Wood did for Lunar Tunes, but unfortunately only 12 of them were published in Witzend.

3. How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start?

I started about 20 years ago. Before that, I collected only comics and did have some autographs from conventions but had no clue you could actually collect comic art. That only came when I started looking at eBay, where I already picked up some pages.. At the time I was living in Germany and I bought some Peter Bagge HATE comics. I found those extremely funny, especially the first page from a Christmas story. Together with a Frank Margerin page, they were the funniest things I ever read.

And... There it was. On eBay! That very one page! Of course I made sure I was highest bidder, but couldn't believe it until I really got the page in my hands. Since then I really started collecting.

That Bagge page is one of few pieces I will never sell, so I didn't put it in my gallery. I will soon put it there though, in a NOT for sale section. I will wait till after Christmas, not to offend Santa.

4. How do you display/store your collection at home?

A lot is on the walls though the house. Almost every room has some art. Luckily, my wife doesn't mind as long as the art is not erotic and there is room enough left for the children's pictures as well.

The rest I keep in a closet especially for my comic art, all in art-maps. I often change the art on the walls, so I get to look at the stored art as well regularly.

5. What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions?

1) I had two comic artists draw birth announcement cards when for my two sons were born, but I didn't do that for my first child, my now thirteen year old daughter. So the first thing on my list is a recreation of a cover with the heroine place taken by my daughter. Since my daughter is half Spanish, I asked a Spanish artist for this. To be continued!2) A comic strip that I read every day for my two sons from the newspaper: Garfield!3) There are about 10-20 pages by Wallace Wood that I really like. Any of those would be great! Especially sci-fi and fantasy.4) A certain page from Frank Margerin, a French artist. Especially one page made me laugh for days, but the change I will ever find it is small... I saw I can put scans on CAF of wanted pages, so I will put that one up!5) A Hagar the Horrible strip. Another family-favorite.